Here I start blogging

Saturday Jul 16, 2011

ISV-Engineering is a worldwide organization in Oracle's Systems Line-Of-Business. Core Charter is to engage with Independent Software Vendors (ISV), to engineer integrated systems that delivers best of class performance creating an Oracle technology an edge over it's competitors.

One of the various programs we run, and known for it's exclusivity is the Tunathon Program. It opens up opportunity for collaboration between core product development, performance engineering and solution architects across Oracle and the participating ISV. Selection of the ISV is based on Oracle's business focus and revenue objectives. Proposals are created, S.M.A.R.T. performance targets agreed up on before the engagement begins.

In the year 2011, we engaged with one of the telecommunication ISVs in India, who is also registered as Gold Member at Oracle Partner Network (OPN). ISV delivers a fully integrated platform for revenue assurance, fraud management, credit risk management, Test-call generation (TCG), re-billing and re-rating solution. Telecommunication operators can maximize revenue by preventing losses and reducing fraudulent risks using the comprehensive enterprise system. A rich data model is provided for variety of targeted analytic and reporting. ISV offers it's services across multiple continents, America, EMEA, and Asia and to many of the top global telecommunication players.

Architecture is based on the latest multi-threaded Java EE Application Server and the fastest Oracle Database Server. The core comprises of multiple adapters for various telecommunication data sources including GSM, UMTS, WiMAX, LTE etc. The Design constitutes collector module, parser, transformer and data loader, with primary focus on ease of deployment, simplified management, agile configuration, robustness, high availability and capabilities to process high volumes of data in shortest time.

Objective of the project was to study various aspects of the solution, characterize the work load and tune the system to perform best on Oracle Solaris SPARC platform. Setup was accessible over remote virtual private network. The user interface, required for software installation and configuration was available via Oracle Secure Global Desktop software which also works on a browser client. It is fast and easy to use with greater security.

At a glance, the application was not consuming enough CPU cycles and many threads (LWP) had high LCK/SLP, resulting in very low system utilization. We used DTrace, an in-built technology in Oracle Solaris to trace process, kernel, filesystem and the JVM.

Oracle Solaris provides many tools to record system statistics. We characterized the application to be IO, CPU and Network intensive. Every source adapter has unique memory demographics.

Oracle ZFS filesystem, in-built in Oracle Solaris can consolidate heterogeneous inexpensive disks together with fast storage devices to build an efficient and fast IO subsystem. Upgrading to latest Java version also improved the performance by 20% out-of-the-box. Oracle Solaris provides special system libraries to boost the application performance. In-depth study of multiple load scenarios determined tunable at each tier for best performance.

All tireless efforts resulted in significant application improvement less one problem i.e. Low utilization of the CPU. Investigation using DTrace lead to source code, causing the mutex contentions resulting in low system utilization. A thorough Design review concluded a data structure, Queue (FIFO) coding logic which insisted the application threads to wait and also added unnecessary overhead making the process slow.

Participation in the Tunathon program helped the ISV achieve 30x improvement on Oracle platform making the system fastest, efficient and cost effective for any telecommunication operator to consider.